Eli5 of we can make lab diamonds on a large scale why can’t we do the same for oil and gas.
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Well, we are using fossil fuels that were formed over hundreds of millions of years in a few centuries. It is unsustainable, but very profitable in terms of energy invested vs. energy returned, because we didn’t pay for the formation of the oil — it is already there, as result of natural processes. We only pay the extraction cost.
As far as I know, there doesn’t really exist a process that could e.g. convert sunlight to oil at suitable scale and cost. At the very least, as much energy would need to be spent on making the oil than is eventually recovered from burning it, so the primary source would have to be sunlight, and it would probably have to be something like algae growing on sea over vast areas, then collected together and somehow converted to oil.
The situation with fossil fuels is akin to living off large inheritance vs. earning the money you plan to spend tomorrow today. In the former, all you have to do is maybe phone someone once in a while to wire you more money you can use, but the latter is real work that must be done to make every bit of money you plan to spend tomorrow during today. Nature gives no loans nor windfall.
We were the party generation, living off this massive inheritance bestowed to us by nature. Future generations will have to pay for everything themselves, and also pay for the carbon dioxide cleanup, if it is even possible, and they will envy and hate us for what we have done. I am sorry, future generations of man.
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